1. Technical Field
Aspects of the present invention relate to a digital image create equipment for creating a digital image by digitalizing an original into a digital image, and more particularly to a digital image create equipment for insetting identified original information that identifies an original and identified user information that identifies a user of a digital image to be distributed or delivered into the original to create the digital image.
2. Related Art
With related art developments in computer technology and digital image technology, a digital image such as a photograph, a picture, a design drawing, an illustration can be readily copied using a personal computer at home. In view of the above, copyright protection for the digital image is an important social issue. To prevent the unauthorized copying or falsification of the digital image, there has been proposed various related art equipment for insetting copyright protection information (hereinafter referred to as “identified information” unless otherwise specified), such as identified original information or identified user information into an original, to create a digital image.
As related art identified information insetting equipment, a related art digital watermark insetting equipment is disclosed in JP 11-41453 A. In this related art insetting equipment, the image of identified information is made of microscopic pixels that cannot be sensed by human eyes, and is inset in the image of an original. As a method of forming the digital watermark image, a related art method of processing image data of the original is known, as will be described later.
(a) A method of producing a digital watermark image by processing color separation image data of yellow that is lowest in resolution of human eyes among three color resolution images (yellow, magenta, cyan) of an original.
(b) A method of producing a digital watermark image by processing luminance data of an original.
Also, to extract the digital watermark image, a special image processing device is required, having a high-precision image analyzing function.
However, the digital image created by the related art digital watermark insetting equipment leads to a problem in that the image information of the original cannot be faithfully reproduced, because the image information on a portion into which the watermark image has been inset is not processed. If the digital image is output by a printer or copied in a low-resolution format, another problem is that the watermark image cannot be reproduced due to the shortness of the resolution of an output printer, or the shortness of recording resolution of an electronic data recording device, so as to lose the identified information.